Alistair took the report and the photo with him and left the jail. Once more he had an excuse to visit Hart Benson.
Since it was Saturday and she told herself she had nothing better to do, Hart had decided to start cleaning the downstairs shop. Her plans weren’t too ambitious, but she wanted at least to clear out some of the dust and cobwebs.
She was using a feather duster to attack those webs within reach when a tapping at her front door attracted her attention. Sheriff Redhawk waved to her through the glass. Even though she didn’t really feel like talking to anybody today and had planned to hole up in her own territory and pretend to be a recluse, she had little choice but to open the door and let him in.
“Morning, Hart,” he said. “Sorry to bother you, but I thought you’d be interested in what I’ve learned.”
She was not in a good mood. She’d spent the last couple of days trying to figure out what to do about Tommy and why she couldn’t feel closer to her own brother.
Sheriff Redhawk always brought disturbing ramifications with him and she didn’t need any more complications to deal with today. Still she let him in.
The air was thick with the dust she’d disturbed with her broom and she felt grimy and knew she probably had spider webs in her hair. She still had no memory of this man past their recent meetings, but she wasn’t blind to the fact of his attractions. He was both intensely masculine with his strong form and chiseled face, but also desirably exotic with his Kiowa heritage. She could envision him on the back of a Indian pony, feathers decorating his headdress and war paint on his face, and found that image strangely intriguing.
She thought it best not to show him upstairs and used her duster to clear a seat for him and another for herself among Mrs. Harris’ old furnishings.
“What do you have to tell me now, Sheriff?” she asked, feeling a frisson of fear. She was beginning to worry about what she would hear next, considering that most of the recent revelations were disturbing the fragile peace she tried to build within her own mind.
His gaze met hers. “I’ve been investigating the situation at Medicine Stick at the time the town was vacated to make way for the lake.”
The simple statement pierced through her as the picture of her little town as she’d last seen it played through her mind from her home with its pink roses growing out front to the Millers’ store where she worked on a regular basis helping customers with their purchases.
She’d liked chatting with her neighbors as they dropped by for their shopping and getting to hear all the latest gossip. It had been a good life with her family and friends. Her most serious concern had come from her knowledge of her own mental wanderings and an increasing fear that her sanity was compromised. She blocked the thought. Where was all this coming from?
“I talked to some people and looked up some stuff, records and such. Did you know the reports from old Medicine Stick schools are in a back room at the county courthouse?”
She frowned, another image coming to her mind, this one of the little brick building where the first eight grades of school met. After that she’d been sent into the high school next door. Most of the kids had stopped at eighth or earlier, but Mama had insisted that her oldest daughter be allowed to continue because she was ‘bookish.’
When she didn’t say anything, he went on. “That Stacia person you mentioned, Stacia Larkin, she made good grades.”
“Mama said nothing was much good but ‘As’ and she didn’t want to see anything else from me. She never got to go to school herself and the boys weren’t much interested, so she pushed Helen and me.”
She realized she’d said the wrong thing when his eyes widened and she realized that even her speech pattern had changed. She didn’t sound like a person with a masters in literature, but more like a country girl from back in the ‘40s. The words that had come from her mouth surprised her as much as they had him.
There was no point in trying to explain something she didn’t understand herself so she didn’t try.
“Stacia had a mother, father, two brothers and a sister named Helen,” he went on as though she hadn’t said something highly disturbing. “All of them showed up in Mountainside after the lake was flooded, but Stacia was never seen by her family again.”
Hart felt as though her stomach dropped to her toes. “How can you know that?”
“They reported her missing. It was in the newspaper and a report was filed with the sheriff of that time.”
“But after that . . .”
“Hart, I made a phone call this afternoon and talked to Helen’s daughter at her home in California. She said her mother wondered all her life what had happened to her sister.”
“Helen has a little girl?”
“Honey, Helen died several years ago. Her daughter is in her fifties and has children of her own.”
Helen was dead. The thought was devastating. And her sister was the youngest of them all; she could have no hope for mom or dad or the boys. She rushed up into the apartment and to her bathroom where she was violently sick.
Alistair followed her into the bathroom, dampening a clean wash cloth and gently washing her face once she stopped vomiting, then giving her a glass of water to wash out her mouth. Finally, holding on to his arm, she went back into the living room with him.
“Hart,” he asked gently. “You never told me who the other man was. Did you think I would try to harm him?”
Her laughter sounded bitter, almost angry. “Alistair, I don’t think I was ever married to you. I don’t remember him and I don’t remember any life with you.”
For the first time he seemed to believe her. She guessed that up to this moment he’d thought she was faking her lack of memory.
She looked pleadingly up at him, conscious of their closeness. “Alistair, I am not Hart Benson. My name is Stacia Larkin and I remember everything about being her up until the time she died.”
He frowned. “You remember dying?”
She shook her head. “No. That’s the puzzling part. I saw her die. I saw her crumple down on the street in front of Millers’ Store and from the way she lay there, I knew she was dead.”
“Then it’s impossible. If you were the one who died, you would have seen the person who killed you. You would have been looking out of Stacia’s eyes, not at her.”
“Do you think I haven’t thought of that?” she shrieked the question.
He took her into his arms and held her comfortingly against his own chest.
“I look into the mirror and the person I see there is not me. I have red hair. I’m taller and more buxom than Hart Benson. But if I’m here in her body, then what has happened to her? What has happened to the woman you love?”
He held her tighter and she knew that he must be thinking that the only possible answer was that she was out of her mind.
Chapter Twelve
Alistair Redhawk was feeling mighty uneasy by the time he left Hart in her apartment, stepping out into a cold wind of the kind that signaled an abrupt change of weather in western Oklahoma.
A norther had blown in, reducing the temperature from summer-warm to winter-cold in the couple of hours he’d been with his wife. He dashed for the car, wishing he’d brought a coat where earlier in the day had been shirt-sleeve weather.
Once out of the biting wind, he rested his face against the steering wheel and considered with a sick heart the problem of Hart Benson Redhawk. She stirred all his protective instincts behaving as she did like a confused little chick who couldn’t find its mother.
She did act differently than she had when they first met. Then she’d been lively, confidently sexual, meeting his own over-sized personality as an equal. But the idea that this Hart wasn’t his Hart was ridiculous. Something had happened to her that had left her temporarily frightened and mixed up. Most likely a head injury, he thought. She would get better and she would remember their love. He had only to give her time.
A radio call of an accident on one of the country roads left him n
o time to consider his personal worries. Turning on his lights, he set the siren to shrieking as he rushed out of town to where a local teen whom he’d known since he was an infant was trapped inside an overturned pickup truck.
Hart avoided looking at herself in the mirror as she brushed her teeth and got into her nightshirt even as the early dark and cold air began to penetrate her apartment. She would settle down by the gas heat of the fireplace and watch her television or read and relax until she couldn’t stay awake.
Winter was coming, it seemed as though they’d skipped autumn, and much as she’d disliked the extreme heat, she dreaded the closed-in season with its gloomy haze of long nights and more time spent indoors. When she was a child, this would have been cotton pulling season and school would have let out for six weeks or so while everybody got in the crop.
It was hard work, but a joyful time too, the one season of the year when everybody had a bit of money and the smell of cotton burrs burning at the local gin lay heavy in the air and Saturday afternoons were the time when all the country people came to town. When she was older, she’d worked at the store with its seasonal buzz as everybody did their shopping for the year, buying clothes and household supplies.
Everybody had seemed light-hearted and friendly, they’d shared each other’s happiness. And in a bad year, when it had failed to rain or hail had knocked out a crop, they had shared worries and sorrow and the Millers had extended what credit they could for necessities.
She missed that sense of community, something that didn’t seem to exist today. Only a few farmers grew cotton now and their farms were huge. Their failures might affect the rest of the community but the average resident remained unaware of that significance.
People were no longer interconnected in the way they had been in the late ‘40s. So many things had changed.
She felt lost and alone in this world where she didn’t belong and with sudden harshness wished she could go back and be the Stacia who had lived in Medicine Stick before it was flooded.
She went to bed late only after she’d drowsed off several times on her sofa, hoping that she’d be able to go to sleep without that early morning wakening that left her sweating with fears, her brain tumbling with negative scenarios.
Caught in a nightmare where a shadowy monster threatened her little sister and she was so frozen in place with fear so she couldn’t reach out to help the small Helen, who looked to be only three or four and kept screaming, ‘Stacia! Stacia!,’ she awakened to a loud sound of tumbling furniture from downstairs.
No mouse makes that much noise. The clashing, clattering noise continued as though one item sent another falling until a whole set had dominoed on the hardwood floor. Still half-asleep Hart stumbled from her bed, through the living room and to the door that led to the stairs.
Operating on automatic, her rational mind still not enough awake to urge caution, she went to the top of the stairs and started down.
But when she was halfway down something clicked on and she realized she was being extremely foolish. Turning around quietly in her bare feet, the nightshirt floating around her, she heard a voice whisper from below. “Stacia? Is that you?”
Her heart started to pound. Almost she recognized that voice, that hoarse voice calling to her. Something about it rippled in her being like fear. Quickly she raced upstairs, closed the door behind her and locked it.
Then, instead of doing something sensible like calling the sheriff or even the Mountainside constables, she crawled into bed and buried herself under the covers. What could she tell them? That she was being haunted by a ghost from the past?
No repeat came of the clamorous noise from downstairs and she lay, stiffly awake for most of the night, only falling asleep when a cloudy gray dawn began to enter the world.
After breakfast she felt a great reluctance to go out her own door, but managed to eventually get up enough courage to open the door and tiptoe down the stairs. The evidence of her visitor from the night before was left in a number of overturned chairs and a small table lying on its side. Dishes lay broken into pieces on the hard floor.
The door, however, was locked and she had to unlatch it to get outside.
It seemed like it would be easier to explain over the phone than in person so she gave the sheriff a call once she was at work, told him what she’d heard, including the fact that someone had called out for Stacia from the darkness below her stairs.
“Don’t go back there until I’ve had a chance to check out the place,” Alistair said grimly.
“But you can’t get in. It’s locked and I have the key.”
“I’ll manage,” he said. Then he asked her what time she usually got home and said he’d be waiting there when she arrived.
The day passed slowly and several times she came close to falling asleep on her feet. Mr. Jeffers, her most dependable customer among the prisoners, asked if she was feeling well and she smiled and said, “Just didn’t sleep well last night.”
He nodded as though he understood, then went back to hunch over the latest Stephen King novel he was reading.
Hart, who had dipped into Salem’s Lot, thought she didn’t need to read scary stories because her own life contained enough spooky stuff. All day that almost familiar voice whispering her name had replayed in her mind, but still she couldn’t think of who it was and when she’d encountered it before.
By the time she drove into Mountainside’s brief downtown to her home, the day was already darkening with fat gray clouds that would have the local farmers hoping for rain and when she stepped out to where Alistair, clad in a heavy coat, waited in the doorway for her, she felt a continued sinking of spirits that had been low all day.
He was taking this seriously. It wasn’t something that had only happened in her imagination.
He greeted her with a nod, pushed open the door and followed her as she wove the way through the contents of the main floor, avoiding the area of recently tumbled furniture and dishes.
“Pack what you need,” he said. “You’re spending the night at your brother’s. It’s not safe here.”
She glanced over her shoulder as she kept going. “No,” she said with a dry mouth. “Not Tommy’s. Not right now.”
He didn’t ask for an explanation. “Then you can bunk out at my place for a few days while we figure out what’s going on.”
She didn’t look around this time. “I couldn’t do that,” she said in a tight little voice she didn’t recognize as her own.
“Look, we found footprints and fingerprints enough in the dust of this place, though so far no IDs on the prints. But somebody got in here last night and that somebody had a key. They could come back tonight.”
She led the way into her apartment, feeling safer once the door closed behind them. “Who could have a key?”
“Most anybody. Cully down at Pizza Plus said Mrs. Harris’ keys hung on a hook back in the kitchen. It wouldn’t have been a big deal to take them somewhere and make copies. I’ve got a locksmith coming out to change the locks, but he can’t get there ‘til tomorrow.”
She drew in a deep breath. She couldn’t face staying here tonight with no sense of the protection of a locked door, no matter how inadequate. “I don’t want to inconvenience you,” she said with prim courtesy.
“It’ll be a lot easier having you at my place then having to stand guard outside all night.”
She managed at least a semblance of a grin and went to pack a few things in a small bag and was quickly ready to go with him. “I think I’ll get a dog,” she said.
“A large one,” he agreed.
They left her car at the constables’ office and drove out to his ranch house together. “What’s the deal with you not staying with Tommy?” he asked. “You two have a row?”
“Not exactly.” She was hesitant to give him the details, feeling as though it was disloyal to talk about kin behind their backs. “Things are just a little uncomfortable.”
“Asked for more money,” he conclude
d in a dry voice.
He did claim to be Hart Benson’s husband and would know details of her life, details not available to her. “Not exactly,” she said again. “It was Nikki.”
“Same old, same old.”
“I’ve given them money before?”
“You’re practically their own personal bank. Look, Hart, the whole town knows your brother is a good enough guy, but he has his problems. So did your dad. It’s the women in your family that have the character. Why did you think your grandmother tied up the money she left you the way she did?”
“I don’t know anything about that.”
“Well, take it from me, Tommy and Nikki spend more of the income available to you than you do.”
If it had been possible for her mood to have dropped any lower, it would have done so. It wasn’t a matter of money; that wasn’t real to her anyway and now that she had her apartment, her car and television set, what else did she need? But there didn’t seem to be anybody to love and trust, anybody that belonged to her.
Maybe Alistair Redhawk who seemed well acquainted with her financial affairs had only married her for the money. Quickly she dismissed the thought as unjustified. “I imagine somebody just broke in thinking some of Mrs. Harris’ things were there for the taking,” she suggested.
“Always possible. Some of that old stuff can be valuable to collectors.”
“But you don’t believe that? You think it has something to do with me?”
He touched the brim of his hat thoughtfully. “Some strange things are going on, Hart. I just didn’t feel good about you staying there tonight.”
Wrong Face in the Mirror: A Time Travel Romance (Medicine Stick Series) Page 8